Sunday, October 12, 2008

Indian Satyam banned from World Bank For Installing Spyware

NEW YORK: Satyam Computer Services has reportedly been banned from doing any off-shore work with the World Bank after the Bank's forensic experts discovered that spy software was covertly installed on workstations inside the bank's Washington headquarters, allegedly by one or more contractors from Satyam Computer Services.

According to a Fox News report, the forensic analysis was conducted after a major breach of the bank's treasury network in Washington in April this year. Upon its discovery, insiders report, bank officials shut off the data link between Washington and Chennai, India, where Satyam has long operated the bank's sole offshore computer centre responsible for all of the bank's financial and human resources information.

Satyam was also banned from any future work with the bank. "I want them off the premises now," Zoellick reportedly told his deputies, according to Fox News. But at the urging of CIO De Poerck, Satyam employees remained at the bank as recently as Oct 1 while it engaged in "knowledge transfer" with two new India-based contractors. The software enabled every character typed on a keyboard to be transmitted to a still-unknown location via the internet.

Fox News claims that outsiders have raided the World Bank Group's computer network, one of the largest repositories of sensitive data about the economies of every nation, repeatedly for more than a year. It is still not known how much information was stolen. But sources inside the bank confirm that servers in the institution's highly restricted treasury unit were deeply penetrated with spy software last April. Invaders also had full access to the rest of the bank's network for nearly a month in June and July.

The contract, which began at $10 million and grew to more than $100 million by 2007, was suddenly not renewed this year.